Yandex restores access to 97% of client data in Yandex Cloud; remainder unrecoverable

MOSCOW. Nov 10 (Interfax) - IJSC Yandex has restored access to 97.16% of customer data in Yandex Cloud, though the remaining data is unrecoverable owing to critical hardware damage and absence of customer backups on the platform, the company said on Tuesday.

"Customers who utilized Yandex Cloud's backup tools experienced no data loss, and 100% of their data has been preserved," the company said.

The recovery efforts follow the incident in October, when several Yandex data centers were damaged by drone attacks.

Yandex Cloud has updated its approach to backups following these events, the company noted. Users previously had to enable backup features manually. However, backups now activate by default when creating new virtual machines, though users may still opt out.

"Engineers continue to distribute Yandex Cloud's computing resources across new, independent locations in various regions of Russia. The number of these locations will continue to grow," Yandex added.

Yandex data centers in Sasovo, Ryazan Region; Kaluga; and Vladimir came under drone attacks on October 8-11. Operations at the data centers in Sasovo and Vladimir were completely halted, while several modules at the Kaluga facility were rendered inoperable. These incidents led to disruptions affecting Yandex's own services and other online resources within the Russian segment of the internet.